I have been trying for many years to move away from writing out of anger or turmoil, from a place of psychological upheaval and trauma. To compose in this way, you fall into the stereotype of the frenzied writer “exorcising demons,” Mozart in his middle years, music erupting from him in a dirty flow, fueled by fear, dread, howling voices.

I find this sort of composition exhausting over time, both as a composer and as an observer. It is also destructive, leading a person over time to think that art can be generated only through crisis and stress — you could grow numb both to pain and to beauty.

I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that the polls are correct about the neck-and-neck nature of the presidential race. Rather, I think we’re in the grip of the massive collective idea that we are a divided nation, evenly divided, perfectly divided, poised. How elegant, beautiful.

This idea is too overpowering, too alluring, for anyone to imagine anything else, or want to imagine anything else, since nothing could be easier. We can simply say, “we are a divided nation.” This explains anything we want it to explain. It doesn’t matter if we’re actually polarized evenly: we can organize our thoughts and opinions around this. Just like all the other controlling images of our society, nothing you couldn’t outline with an 8-color box of crayons.

What sort of thing usually breaks blinding obsessions? I mean, apart from the whale dragging the Pequod down completely? Because whatever does, we need one now.

Of course, I thought Abu Ghraib was it: an unambiguous sign that we had lost all the global support of September 12th; that we had utterly forgotten how 9/11 was a crime against humanity not just against Americans; that we had embraced the ideology of our enemies and become them; that we were drifting aimlessly in a moral vacuum, casual violence the only vocabulary still retaining any sort of value.

But while I am still reeling in despair from those photos and their nauseating ramifications, no one “out there” seems to remember. The new anchors aren’t weeping with horror and shame each evening from their carpeted soundstages. No one is overturning cars and setting fire to the business districts. No one is marching on Washington and raging incoherently into the correspondents’ cameras. Not, at any rate, any significant proportion of the population. Certainly not exactly half the country.

And I’m not either, so which side am I on, really?

What can all this mean?

One thought is that we secretly believe we deserve it, that we deserve the hatred, the chanting mobs and car bombs, that it’s about time someone scolded us.

Another thought is that we welcome any sign of evil and destruction as evidence for our hard dualism. If we saw no evil in the world, our particular notion of good would cease to exist in any meaningful way. So we let evil persist (not like smallpox in a laboratory fridge, but like disgruntled servants downstairs).

The last thought, the one that stays with me when the abstractions fall away, is that we are simply a glib pack self-absorbed morons who honestly can’t grasp anything more complex than the vague totalitarian rituals of reality television, that our preoccupation with good and evil are just spiritualized versions of an instinctive consumer’s notions of good and bad: good fiber, bad carbs; good savings, bad credit.

We strutted around, pontificating on the divine concept of “liberty,” and we were bluffing. The terrorists called our bluff: we don’t give a shit about liberty. We want the lights to go on when we flip the switch in the den; we want hot water in the taps; we want fresh milk on the shelves; we want six hundred cable channels. And if that means that some of us have to be held without trial in military bases, then so be it.

We are well-fed and we are bored. Someone told us that the nuances don’t matter and we believed them. We are domesticated animals. Not one half of us, not the other half. All of us.

I don’t think poetry is necessarily after clarity, and I certainly never expect accuracy. I prefer a little slack between language and meaning, like the slack we find between language and the world itself.

Speech remains supple through constant blurring of the boundaries of received definitions. A word means this today then, maybe, a shade of that tomorrow. The cognates branch and fan out, and dialects accrete like silt over the bedrock. “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.”

Writing ossifies this process, of course — which is, you know, not entirely a bad thing; we all need good, strong bones.

Words become things, things become words again, and distinctions follow distinctions.

Empty the room to see the room.
Strain against voice to discover voice.

I will continue my explorations today by venturing to the Apple Store in Santa Monica, where I plan to watch the MacWorld Expo keynote tomorrow morning. The rumors include Apple’s long-anticipated replacement for Microsoft Office, and cheap low-end iPods. I haven’t been following the rumors. I never really listen to the rumor sites, but you can’t help but hear things sometimes.

Last night, we attended a party hosted by one of the teachers in The Wife’s program. His apartment is north of LA near Hollywood, and is perched on a west-facing hill with a panoramic view. We drove there and back on several LA freeways. Have I mentioned this is a large city? It is super-sized. As we wended our way slowly over underpasses, under overpasses, we could spy a number of downtown skylines. I have heard LA described as forty-six suburbs in search of a city, and our pilgrimage last night bore this observation out.

And at the moment, I have more California- and *LA-*centric songs going through my head than I can stand. Especially whenever I cross Santa Monica Boulevard. The bartender looks up from his want ads.

Our kind hosts waiting for us in Mesa directed us along a different route from what we’d planned, and we are mightily glad they did. We left I-40 at Holbrook, Arizona, and angled southwest through fog and crags and steep mountains. Take away the cactus, wait around for sixty or eighty million years, and you’d almost think you were in the Scottish Highlands, but with a wee bit more sunshine.

Everything we encountered after ditching the interstate took our breath away. The mountains were vast and seemingly endless in their variety; at times they appeared soft and rumpled, and at times they looked cracked, tortured, and broken. The clouds tangled with the peaks and wove themselves into the folds and rifts. I kept hearing Butch saying wearily to Sundance, “LaForce is strictly an Oklahoma man; I don’t know where we are, but it sure as hell isn’t Oklahoma.”

We sure as hell weren’t in Oklahoma. There were moments when we feared that these overwhelming, elemental vistas would spoil us for the comparatively mild views in northern New Mexico. (This fear would be allayed, rather violently, later on our second day of driving.)

We passed through all four seasons that day, the first of 2004. Deep fog and drizzle; snow; searing sunshine; dry buffeting winds.

From the early morning of New Year’s Day, when we headed south on St Francis Road to I-25, to the late afternoon as we pulled into Mesa (past the crumbling dirt lots on one side of the wide boulevards and the opulent golf courses on the other), we had descended from seven thousand feet above sea level to just over one thousand.

We spent a very relaxing and enjoyable night in Mesa. We got back on the road at about nine yesterday morning. I-10 heads west out of the Phoenix area and carries on interminably until it hits the ocean, the airport, and our hotel.

We crossed western Arizona as the morning wore on. The distant mountains resembled Mordor, and the nearby mountains resembled great mounds of gravel dumped along the side of the road. When we arrived at the state line, we met the Colorado river, looking quite pleased with itself after the magnificent artifice it had wrought with otherwise stubborn rock a few hours north of there.

Southeastern California is the most efficacious cure for insomnia I have yet encountered. The mountains can’t quite muster the enthusiasm required to be impressive; the flats in the near distance seem somnolent in their uniform yellowness; the listless scrub and brush dotting the landscape appear lost and wandering. The cactus, which in other settings displayed an austere mystery that approached an ineffable majesty, here merely looked like bored people in a dole queue. Just when we thought we couldn’t take it anymore, the mountains closed in, snagging a storm system and locking it in place overhead, and obscured the sun. An apocalyptic pall fell over the whole scene, with an unnerving wind that began battering us with an annoying persistence, like a wailing child in a supermarket.

I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I found myself yearning for the interminable sprawl of Los Angeles.

It rained all afternoon, and we crawled our way into the city, our only consolation being that we were now awash in signals from lavishly funded NPR stations.

Our hotel is a bit old and tired, but generally comfortable. Our room looks northeast, and we can watch the planes on final approach to LAX. The Wife has already begun her program, and will be dancing every day for the next two weeks. I will be relishing a bit of R&R (though with a fair amount of R&D, since there is never any complete time-off for intrepid self-employed persons).

I have yet seen very little of the city, but I am busily clicking my way around Mapquest to locate various important nearby destinations, and to get a sense of where exactly I am.

I am in Los Angeles, and the sun is shining.